Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2000 00:07:59 -0800 (PST)
Subject: HAB: Individuation & Sociality (re: MP on H's sociocentrism)



Matthew:

I believe there's a much stronger importance to individuality for
Habermas than, as you validly say, that "there do appear to be traces
of an extra-socialised individual identity being made available for
Habermas's analysis of the connection between individual and social
learning processes" (11/10, "Hab's sociocentrism"). I would go
further than this because I believe that individuality is integral to
his sociocentric thinking, from his early reading of Jena Hegel
("Labor and Interaction....") through the notion of the emancipatory
interest; in the distinction between ethical and moral interests and
above all as the equiprimordiality of subjectivity relative to
objectivating and intersubjective meaning (and the correlate
expression of intentions that can be questionably genuine in any
speech act); and *therefore* individuality is integral in
reconstructive scientific analysis, specifically for theorization of
learning. 

M: ....I have reservations about Piaget's
decentration-of-the-individual thesis by itself....

G: I'm unfamiliar with such a thesis. I thought decentration
pertained to cognition, what Habermas calls "field independence" at
the end of "Ego Identity & Moral Development" (CES), rather than
individuality altogether relative to sociality.

M: .... I worry about Habermas's uptake of Piaget's model EXCEPT as a
heuristic or analogical device which I think it is clearly intended
to be more than.... 

G: I yield to Steve Chilton on this (earlier today).

M: On one level, I find Habermas's transpositioning of Piaget's
developmental model onto societal evolution ....Too metabiological
for me I suppose. 

G: I regard what Habermas is doing here as he regards it: aspects of
a fallibalistic research program that is as interested in (1)
exemplifying new KINDS of reconstructive scientific inquiry--the kind
of interdisciplinarity that he thematizes as such (beyond "philosophy
as stand-in") in the first two chapters of _MCCA_--as he is
interested in (2) making specific falliblistic claims (in  specific
terms of given research models, Piaget and Durkheim say). It would be
invalid to say that Habermas is "transpositioning" developmental
modeling "onto" social-evolutionary modeling. Rather, he is
exemplifying an initial proposal--or initializing an
exemplification--of the prospect that social-evolutionary modeling
can be BASED ON developmental modeling. In other words, at the birth
of the cognitive revolution in the human sciences, Habermas was
already cognitivist anthropology post-hermeneutically (_TCA_). 

----------------------------------

M: ....I believe there is enough textual basis for a reading of
Habermas's social systems theory in the writings of this period which
can make explicit an implicit mechanical cyberneticism in his
analysis. 

G: Good luck. Or not: How do you distinguish hermeneutical projection
from hermeneutical disclosure? The evidentiary burden is severe,
given that Habermas was a leading critique of scientism,
instrumentalism, and technicism before the _CES_ period.

M: This [cyberneticism] fades in my opinion by the time of the _TCA_
admittedly,....

G: But Habermas might respond that the _TCA_ is a deepening and
extension of earlier work, not a different time. _LC_ was overtly
"argumentation sketches" and, of course, _CES_ is a collection of
essays. Very credibly, _TCA_ is the integrative deepening and
extension of prospective and variously focused *prior* work, not any
kind of break with formatively earlier work. 

 M....although there are traces of [mechanical cyberneticism] in
Habermas's theory of crises and the new social movements as a
defensive (mechanical) reaction to the colonisation of the
lifeworld.....

G: Depends on what can be hermeneutically argued about the meaning of
"are" and "in", respecting the difference between the object of
critique (which faces at the group level the issues of genuineness
socially that the individual faces at the level of one-to-one
interaction) and the assumptions of that critique (a discourse of
social evolution-- participating discursively in the evolutionarity
that is thematized through, in part, critique). 

M: ....Habermas seems to try and tread a fine line between Parsons
and Luhmann when he introduces systems theory into his work....

G: Again, differences between object and implicature
apply--appropriate themselves *as* discursive practices.

M: Where I am attempting to 'imagine' something akin to Popper's
evolutionary epistemology is in the explanatory gap which exists in
Habermas's under-accounted for transpositioning of "individually
acquired learning abilities" into "societal learning processes"
_CES,1979,121_  ....

G: But since this so-called "gap" is filled-in by _TCA_ and the
complementary   _MCCA_ merely two years after _TCA_, wouldn't you
have to implausibly truncate works (1980-1983) that are
deep-structurally isomorphic with work of the mid-70s (where the
later work *provides* the deep-structural homology that integrates an
extended discourse extending into the late '80s) in order to maintain
the appeal of Popperian kindredness?

M: Again the potential usefulness of memetic theory is suggested to
me. If I am reading Habermas correctly in his essay, _The Development
of Normative Structures_ , then the advent of modernity has enabled
newer ontogenetic potentials of will formation, which are carried
through from the individual level to the societal level.

G: As generalizable interests. 

M: Social movements are held by Habermas to be one collective vehicle
for the expression of the newer potentials for individual
will-formations which have become available in modernity. 

G: Ego-identical will formations enter into *social* movements
inasmuch as they become group-identical, expressing generalized
interests. 

M: Yet there are of course a multiplicity of interest groups
operating and competing in a social system. It becomes a question of
understanding the logic by which the "latently available structures
of rationality" that are expressed in a social movement can come to
be consolidated in a form of "institutional embodiment", especially
given the multiplicity of interests operating in a social system.

G: Which Habermas addresses extensively in work of the 1990s on
democratic law, especially _Between Facts & Norms_.

M: ....in  between the lines of Habermas's essay there is
discernible/imaginable (!) an emphasis given to the selective role of
an environment which is comprised of both lifeworld and material
moments. 

G: Lifeworld : materiality :: consitution (cognition) :
objectivation--altogether in the personal/cultural/social environment
of our communicative form of life. 

M: This environment finally delineates or indeed provides the range
of possibilities of what changes to normative structures can be
effected by the ontogenetic potentials....

G: Yet, the environmental mediation of normative structures and
ontogenetic potentials is not straightforward or immediate; rather
actualization is very circumlocutionary-- through stages of
ethical/moral-cognitive development in-and-around all the structures
(domains and ranges, levels and bredths) of embodied lifeworld and
employed systems that are expressed by personality, culture and
society. 

Habermas: "....the change of normative structures REMAINS DEPENDENT
on evolutionary challenges posed by unresolved, economically
conditioned, system problems and on learning processes that are a
response to them" (emphases Matthew's),....

G: These challenges--which can be evolutionary in Habermas'
*anthropological* sense of 'evolutionary': Sociocultural meaning
trumps naturalistic process from the first moment of life, since the
ontogenic environment is intentionalistic-- familial--from the first
days of parenting, beginning in the auratic, proprioceptive semiosis
of infant=mother bonding that becomes more and more
intentionalistically organized). SO...

M: ... Habermas allows for a circular individual/societal learning
process,....

G: And this circularity is manifold: temporal, embodied, semantic,
familial, local, and regional. So, it is strongly evident in
Habermas' work that....

M: .... his statement that "It is only in a derivative sense that
societies 'learn'" [grants] primacy to the ontogenetic over the
phylogenetic. 

G: But this shows far more than...

M: ...the trace of extra-socialised individual identity maintenance
referred to above....I guess what bothers me is whether or not there
is a stage at which we are socialised in some completer sense as
individuals,....

G: This suggests a post-conventional level of development, whether
Piagetian, Kohlbergian, Habermasian or otherwise (There *is* a lot of
"otherwise" in contemporary educational psychology).

M:....and then can remain as such for some relevant period of time on
a plateau of Piagetian developmental progress or maturation. 

G: I wouldn't wish a plateau on anyone. A lifespan approach to
development is appropriate here. I consider that Habermas' own
understanding--expressed *by* his work over the years (differentiable
from the developmental thematics *in* his work)--exemplifies a
generalizable post-conventional way of understanding and analysis
that applies to a lifespan sense of lifeworld individuality. The rich
understanding of individuation that belongs to Analytical psychology
(the Jungian tradition) or Eriksonian psychology is very relevant
here as well. 

M: I am not suggesting that socialisation ever stops, and that we
somehow grow into Robinsoe Crusoes or develop a transcendental ego of
sorts. But there does appear to be the potential for a heightened
degree of social self-consciousness - which may or may not simply
replicate all the problems of the philosophy of subjective
consciousness on another level - which can preform the individual
actor's 'decisive' engagement with a communicative action.

G: I agree. This is the realm of understanding that Habermas attends
to in _Philosophical Discourse of Modernity_ , beyond
"subject-centered reason" in a psychoculturalized society (which
seems to be going on, as far as Habermas' is concerned, with master
memeticists such as Foucault, Derrida, and other suspicious French
slackers).

This was fun---refreshingly recollective. 

Best regards

Gary








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